It’s finally time to do the habit accountability post! Oh how exciting. What a time to be alive!

*cough*

Anyway.

The last couple months have been a mixed bag, as months within reality tend to be. I was about to say that nothing major went wrong, but that’s relative. Unlike last year, I didn’t get laid off, and I didn’t break up from a long term relationship at any point on January and February. Instead, I just got my ass kicked by SAD for much of it, was rejected from a job I desperately wanted, and had undiagnosed pneumonia for 2+ weeks that then took an additional week to kick and a few additional days to move past any residual tiredness and anxiety. So maybe not as major as a layoff or a breakup, but given it’s all relative…yeah. Still pretty big in their own way.

Habits really came and went during the time span, but I’m still dedicated to try and get all of these nailed down, along with accomplishing my year goals. I’m not holding myself particularly accountable for the last couple weeks of February, because of the whole pneumonia thing. Really, all of February is grading on a significant curve.

With all that in mind, here’s the results in a probably-hideous table so this post isn’t a hundred pages long. For some of these, there’s definitely a margin of error, as I’d forget to update my habit tracker sometimes. Also I allowed a half point for some habits if I got to a given milestone (e.g. being ready early except for having fed Jabberwocky, or working out but not stretching after). Weeks are counted in the month the week started in.

Note: This ended up being even uglier than intended because apparently my old version of WordPress doesn’t believe in having borders between cells. Apologies! I’ll try to find a better way to do this next month. It might be time to finally update to a version of WordPress with the block editor…

Daily Habits

Weekly Habits

Thoughts So Far

Physical Health Goals

Exercise, while not nearly as consistent as I would have liked, was still pretty good! At this point I’ve done a pretty good job internalizing how much better regular exercise makes me feel, which works as good motivation. I still struggle with fitting it into my day. It tends to end up taking longer than I think it will, to the point there’s no good time to do it. The main thing I’ve learned is I really have to work out in the morning, the chances of me doing so in the afternoon or evening are much lower, no matter what I tell myself.

The supplemental stretches/exercises need more consistency. All of them are by far more effective if I do them every day, and I’m sure by having 2-3 day gaps consistently I’m denying myself a lot of progress.

I’ve kept 5k steps around as a goal, but keep failing at it. I’ve kept it to get me to go out of my apartment on walks, and…fail to do so. I still get enough steps in semi-regularly, but I need to embrace taking a break to go for a walk and try to build that as a supplemental habit. I’m going to go loony in my apartment all day, might as well take actual steps (rimshot) to fight against that.

Sleeping enough continues to be my white whale. I have trouble getting to bed, despite sometimes being tired enough earlier in the day I’m falling asleep while watching TV. I’ll get a random second wind at like 9-10pm that I still haven’t nailed down the source of. I should work on turning screens off earlier, it’d eliminate playing games or dicking around on the internet as potential sources of staying up too late. Plus there’s the whole “screen backlights confuse your brain” thing. My main struggle there is that while I definitely have things to do in my home without screens, I can’t shake the idea that it’s going to be super boring so I don’t want to. I think it’s just something I need to force myself to do the first couple times until I can internalize the benefits (or realize there aren’t any for me, depending).

Organization and Cleaning

Ooof. All over the place.

Morning planner use and planning my week both are going well. I take too long to do both, in terms of time spent with pent to paper, and it can feel like my planning is eating up a bunch of time from doing things. I’d like to improve on that. I might just need to focus on it as a solo task instead of listening to or half-watching stuff while I fill it out, as I often do. Evening planner isn’t nearly so consistent, which is a shame because it doesn’t take long at all. I just don’t end up doing it and go directly to bed instead. Evening rituals are obviously not my strong suit.

The 20 minutes of cleaning is fairly effective in getting myself to actually clean, and certainly more than I would otherwise, but I’m still working on consistency. Same with dishes. I’ve started backsliding on dishes pretty bad and as part of March will try to claw my way back up to doing them consistently and more often.

As someone who had a job that started at 9 AM for years, I for the life of me can’t figure out how I’m doing so poorly at getting ready by 9. I assume it’s because there’s no external source of pressure. No job to show up to, no person to meet, any sort of accountability or deadline. Need to find a way to make the idea stick, because I truly am happier if have a tight morning where I get some important things done, start the day off right, and have time before noon to do other stuff I want to do that day.

Blogging is going well! Hopefully at least SOME of what I’m writing is enjoyable to anyone but me. I do realize personal blogs are out of vogue, but I want to let this blog just be what it is and not put too much pressure on myself to make it polished and tight. At least not for now.

Journaling should happen more but I don’t keenly feel it’s loss. Shrug.gif

The WTBBL work doesn’t quite fit here, but I don’t want to give it its own header of shame. If you look at the numbers, it’s obvious that’s been a fucking trash fire. I’m giving myself until the end of April to make significant progress and if that doesn’t happen I’ll admit extremely-shameful defeat. Even though it’ll feel like pulling my own teeth out.

Creative

God damn do some of those numbers suck.

I’m most pissed about the novel project not getting enough love. I’d leave it until the end of the day a lot of days and then simply run out of gas. I also keep losing momentum on it from not hacking away at it every day, which makes it a bigger mental task to start, so there’s that fun negative feedback loop. I need to do more of it the remainder of this month. It’s a clear sign I’m neglecting something that’s really important to me, and that’s damn shitty.

I have been doing morning pages consistently, which might actually be part of the problem. They can run long as hell. I’ve done like 1-2k+ words in a single morning pages sitting before! It’s good to get in some looser writing time but I think I’m burning a bunch of creative energy on it I’d rather go to a bigger project. It can also take up a chunk of my morning and fuck up the flow of my morning routine such as it is.

Art’s been great. Again, not as consistent as I’d like, but doing well. I’ve been drawing, and while I’m not sure I’m improving yet it’s good to be getting practice in at all. I’m at least shaking off the rust, for sure.

Conclusion

Habits are hard! I’m glad I’m tracking them, and external accountability like this is nice. I need to nail down daily routines a lot more. I don’t have any externally-enforced structure right now, which doesn’t help. However, I know doing these habits is satisfying and improves my quality of life in a lot of ways. I’m hopeful I can find a way to build structure into my own life that works for me and that I can use consistently. I just need to find the right combination of self-discipline and desire to make it happen. (Depression almost definitely doesn’t help. Brains are dumb.)

All of these habits have felt good to do, though! It’s been nice to realize I made pretty good choices about what to focus on doing more consistently this year.

I’ll do my best to keep improving, and I’ll check in with y’all next month. 🙂